Nous.net

Nous Global Markets continued in its mission to make financial markets globally accessible with today’s launch of TIQL (pronounced tickle), a consumer-friendly way to trade.

Nous is touting its new app as the “safest way to trade.” Some of TIQL’s distinguishing features include:

$5 minimum to open an account

$0.01 minimum investment per trade

Free downside protection makes it impossible to lose more than was invested

Receive returns of up to 20x

TIQL launched in beta in April of this year, and has since received an OGRA license to operate by the Isle of Man Gambling Supervision Commission. The app’s early users from “many countries around the world” have invested $280,000 on the platform. The London-based company plans to raise funding to expand the already-growing platform, which is available on PC, iOS, and Android devices.

At FinovateEurope 2014, the company debuted its flagship product, SparkProfit. The free-to-play, virtual trading game now has 400,000 users from more than 200 countries. In late 2015, Nous closed a $750,000 funding round, bringing the company’s total funding to $1.36 million.

[Update] Nous has closed the round, exceeding expectations by raising $750,000 from angels and crowdfunding. This is $223,000 more than its original goal of $527,000.

Nous, a startup that builds products for global financial market enthusiasts, announced last week it has raised 88% of its £350,000 ($527,000) goal in its second external round of funding. The London-based company is currently raising funds on SyndicateRoom, a professional angel-crowdfunding site.

The campaign has two weeks remaining. Nous anticipates it will achieve and possibly exceed its goal amount to reach its overfunding limit.

Nous plans to use the funds to launch an ultra-low-risk trading app to serve a demographic overlooked by current financial products.

The founders of Nous bootstrapped the company with $500,000, and raised $605,000 in funding last year.

With an investment of $600,000 (£375,000) financial data startup Nous is now that much closer to its goal of leveraging the insights of the crowd for the benefit of real-world professional investors at banks, hedge funds, and other financial institutions.

Nous CEO Justin Short noted that the investment would provide more than just new capital for a company that was “self-funded, pre-revenue, and pre-launch” when we met them at FinovateEurope 2014 in London. “All of our investors will contribute not just capital, but also their considerable industry experience,” Short said. “We now have even stronger connections to the forward thinking hedge-funds that can make the most of our unique data feeds.”

The investors for this angel round of funding were not disclosed.

Nous has developed a trading simulator, SparkProfit, that allows thousands of users to predict the price direction of a wide variety of instruments, such as bitcoin, international currencies, stock market indices, and commodities. Top performing predictors on the platform can then compete for weekly cash prizes.

But this is only the beginning. By monitoring the predictions on the platform, Nous is able to offer a sentiment indicator called SparkFeed. SparkFeed works in real-time and according to the Nous provides a better sense of the emotions driving market behavior than that offered by either traditional sentiment algorithms as well as newer “social media” based sentiment measures. Nous calls this “crowd-sourced alpha.”

A few metrics on Nous:

84,000 users in 200 countries

250,000 predictions a week

More than $61,000 paid in weekly prizes since May 2013

Nous was founded in September 2012 and, after operating in Japan initially, is now headquartered in London. The company hopes to grow its user base to 250,000 over the next six months, and plans to use the funding to add both new markets and social features to its platform.